Rune #2
Human ears wouldn’t have caught the words through the glass. Lion ears were not human ears. Every syllable carried with crisp, damning clarity.
“—a disservice to the cultural integrity of this block.” Gerald’s chin was lifted, one hand raised in practiced authority.
“I’ve been patronizing SoHo since before you were born, young lady.
This neighborhood has a standard. An aesthetic.
What you’ve built here is—” The sweeping hand encompassed the store how a prosecutor encompasses evidence of poor taste.
“—a novelty. Lipstick and costumes. It’s not serious retail.
Perhaps you should reconsider the concept if you’d like to be taken seriously as a merchant on this block. ”
Beside Rune, Dekel inhaled through his teeth. A sharp, quiet hiss.
Lark stood behind her counter. Arms at her sides.
Her chin was up, but her shoulders had drawn back—a millimeter, no more, the kind of retreat only someone watching closely would notice.
She was listening. Not arguing. Letting Gerald deliver his assessment the way a professional absorbs an unreasonable client: with grace, and with cost.
“I appreciate your perspective,” she said. Even. Measured. The bright warmth stripped from her voice, replaced by careful neutrality that sounded nothing like her. “Villainette serves a different market than what you may be accustomed to, but I assure you the concept is—”
“The concept is a gift shop with ambitions.” Gerald shook his head slowly. “I’m not trying to be unkind. I’m trying to help. This block deserves better.”
A customer near the beauty bar glanced over. Breezy, visible at the back of the store, had stopped typing and was watching with the coiled stillness of a woman calculating how many seconds to allow before intervention.
Rune’s lion hit the surface of his skin like a wave against a seawall.
The sensation was instantaneous—heat flooding his chest, his vision sharpening to predatory focus, a low vibration building in his throat that he clamped down on before it became audible.
His hair rose. Not at the temples. Everywhere.
The thick fall across his forehead lifted and thickened, the follicles responding to a surge of adrenaline and territorial fury that had nothing to do with Gerald’s complaints about bass frequencies and everything to do with the woman behind the counter who had pulled her shoulders back because a man was standing in her store making her feel small.
No one diminishes her.
The thought arrived without permission. Fully formed. Non-negotiable.
“Rune.” Dekel’s voice was careful. “Your hair.”
“I see it.”
“You’re also growling.”
He was. A low, subsonic rumble that vibrated in his sternum and would be inaudible to human ears but unmistakable to any shifter in the vicinity. He cut it off. Smoothed his hair with both hands. It refused to settle.
“I’m going next door.”
“I know you are.” Dekel stepped aside. “Try not to eat Gerald. He owes us twelve thousand for a consignment hold.”
Rune buttoned his jacket. Walked through the door. Three steps of SoHo sidewalk. Through the Villainette entrance, the brass bell chiming overhead.
The store engulfed him—the scent, the light, the throb of a playlist he’d spent five days resenting.
Gerald stood mid-lecture, one hand raised in a gesture of condescension so practiced, it had its own muscle memory.
Lark was behind the counter, and up close, Rune could see what the glass gap had only hinted at: her jaw was tight, her hazel eyes bright with the particular sheen of someone refusing to let a stranger see her flinch.
She saw Rune. Her expression shifted—surprise, then a flash of wariness. Expecting reinforcement for Gerald’s position. Expecting the neighbor who’d asked her to turn down the music to arrive and pile on.
He did not pile on.
“Gerald.” His voice cut through the playlist and the lecture and the purple-lit air like a blade through paper. Not loud. He never needed loud. The lion’s resonance carried the authority—a vocal frequency that made the air tighten and Gerald’s raised hand lower by degrees. “That’s enough.”
Gerald turned. “Rune, I was simply explaining to this young woman—”
“You were explaining your preferences to a business owner in her own store. Preferences she didn’t ask for.
” Rune stopped beside Gerald. He didn’t touch him.
Didn’t crowd him. He occupied the space the way his lion occupied territory—completely, immovably, with the quiet implication that the boundaries were not suggestions.
“Ms. Coleman runs a successful retail brand with multiple locations. Her choices are hers to make. If the neighborhood doesn’t suit your standards, Gerald, I’m happy to recommend our Oslo flagship. The acoustics there are pristine.”
Silence.
Gerald blinked. His mouth worked. The reading glasses slid down his nose. In thirty years of patronage, Rune Sterling had never spoken to him with anything less than impeccable deference.
“I—” Gerald straightened his overcoat. The bluster deflated in stages, like a balloon losing air through a dignified pinhole. “I merely thought she should know—”
“She knows.” Rune’s gaze didn’t waver. “She also didn’t invite a critique. Are we finished?”
Gerald left. The brass bell chimed his exit. The store settled. The playlist continued, unbothered.
Rune stood in the middle of Villainette—everything his store was not—and turned to face the woman behind the counter.
Lark stared at him.
Not the teasing stare from the first meeting. Not the competitive spark from the glass-gap encounters. A different look—open, unguarded, stripped of banter. Her hazel eyes searched his face with an intensity that his lion absorbed as a physical touch, warm pressure spreading across his skin.
“You didn’t have to do that.” Her voice was quieter than he’d ever heard it. “He’s your customer. A loyal one, from the sound of it.”
“He was being inappropriate.”
“He was being a snob. I’ve handled snobs before.”
“I’m certain you have.” Rune clasped his hands behind his back—the posture he defaulted to when his body wanted to do things his brain hadn’t authorized, like reach across the counter and touch the tension out of her jaw. “That doesn’t mean you have to handle them from my store.”
Her lips parted. The wariness dissolved, replaced by an expression he couldn’t catalog—gratitude tangled with surprise tangled with the specific confusion of someone recalculating a man she thought she’d already figured out.
“Your hair is doing something,” she said. Softer than the last time. Not teasing. Observing.
He resisted the urge to touch it. “I’m aware.”
“Does it always do that when you’re…” She paused. Chose her words with uncharacteristic care. “Worked up?”
Worked up. He’d expelled a seventy-three-year-old collector from her store, burned a thirty-year customer relationship without hesitation, and his lion was purring—not growling, purring—at the sight of her face softening toward him. Worked up was an understatement of geological proportions.
“It’s a physiological response,” he said. “Unrelated to emotional state.”
“Mmm.” She tilted her head. The corner of her mouth lifted—not the full smile. Quieter. Reserved for moments that surprised her. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
The nickname landed differently this time. Not a barb. Not a challenge. An olive branch wrapped in a nickname.
He nodded. Turned. Walked out of her store and back into his own, where the air was cool and the lighting was exacting and Dekel was leaning against the counter with the expression of someone who had witnessed the entire exchange through the glass gap and would be dining out on it for years.
“You told Gerald Fontaine—Gerald Fontaine, who has spent four hundred thousand dollars with us—to shop in Oslo.”
“He was being rude.”
“He’s been rude his entire life. You’ve never cared before.” Dekel’s grin spread slow and wide. “You cared today because he was being rude to her.”
Rune turned to the counter. “Gerald will return. His collection dependency outweighs his ego.”
“That’s not a denial.”
“It’s a market analysis.”
“It’s a man who walked into a store full of villain lipstick to defend a woman he’s known for five days, and his hair is still standing up.”
Rune pressed both palms flat against the display case. His hair was, indeed, still elevated. His lion paced in long, satisfied circuits behind his ribs, radiating a warmth that bordered on smugness.
He had no defense. He had market analysis and courtesy and the cease-and-desist letter sitting in his desk drawer, and none of it explained why Gerald Fontaine’s condescension toward Lark Coleman had triggered a protective response more visceral than anything he’d experienced in twelve years of alpha leadership.
“Dekel.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Don’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Dekel’s grin said otherwise. “I’m texting Aspen, though. She’ll want to know about the hair.”